OpenAI treats compute as a profit center

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 58:26

   I mean, everything in this field that is successful is going to take a lot of compute. I mean, the two of you in particular, and I think Ilya and some others, you know, kind of famous for going all in on where you were going to direct the compute in the early days. And now you have to make these very difficult decisions. You have to serve all these customers that you have. You've got to make some money because you're spending a lot of money.

2. 58:47

   And, you know, so you two are both wired to take the very biggest bet possible, but you're constrained now by the business to some degree. So that just seems very difficult. I feel like it's not in your nature. You're looking skeptical. It's a strange phrasing because I don't feel constrained by the business. I feel enabled by the business because the business is what has really allowed us to say we can scale compute.

3. 59:14

   right i remember when we launched chat gpt and i remember we were talking right afterwards and we're trying to figure out how much compute to buy and it's just like we got to buy it all we just got it we got to do it because it's just so clear there's so much demand and i think that that has been a huge unlock in our ability to get lots of compute for yeah i think without this incredible revenue machine we would not be able to convince anyone that we should get all this get this but then the impression obviously when you see the stories about stargate and things like that is that you guys are somehow pulling back on infrastructure i don't know where that's coming from uh like there you know there'll be like a site here and there we say okay you know what this particular site maybe it only has air cooling and so this is not as valuable to us as this other

4. 59:55

   site and like there's specifics and people really want to write the story of like pulling back but Very soon it will be again, like, OpenAI is so reckless. How can they be spending this crazy amount? So, like, the media will go, will flip out either way, just because you all need something to write about, I guess. But we will keep building out as much compute as we possibly can. One thing that I think is also worth thinking about is that compute for us is not a cost center.

5. 1:00:22

   It's a profit center, right, when you deploy it in the product. And so in many ways, our business is extremely simple, right? we rent or buy compute and then we resell it at a margin and as long as we have some positive margin on it then it's scalable right because the demand is just unlimited so okay so data center hardware still all systems go or you mean like our own chip yeah own chip networking yeah very very excited about our our chip we have an incredible team when titan when i know we're not talking about timelines of course but uh i'll just say that like i spend a lot of time with that team and i think it's so they do a great job so that's how cell system go robotics sounds like it's all systems it's gonna be a while till we have something to where you're like oh this is the chat should be team moment but but but you haven't i am confident on that program social

6. 1:01:11

   robots are not the current thing yeah but are going to be so clearly important okay and social network? Not doing that. And then clearly the super app, the browser, all that stuff is still going. Yeah, and one thing to realize about super app, because I feel like it's one of these things where it's like a catchy word. I thought you guys came up with this. I mean, but it's used as internal short. Exactly. This is the thing to realize is that sometimes we're communicating to our team, and then, of course, it ends up being communications to the world, and these are not intended to be the same thing. Super app, in many ways, it's an iceberg, right? It's like, yes, we're going to have an app and you'll see updates to what the codex app is today to make it so it's codexes for everyone and i think that ultimately like what that becomes that we have we have a lot of steps

7. 1:01:56

   to get to where we want to be but it's really about saying we're building this unified agentic infrastructure that i described and that is i think going to be a huge unlock for every single thing people want to do okay um you and i've talked a little bit about you know you guys have